April 29, 2011

Wherein I announce myself failure personified.

Considering the title of this post there is little point working towards an awesome mindmelting twist ending shocker about the state of my being. I’m a failure, I’m a fuck up, I’m not in a good head space and I am rubbish at altering the orbit of my skull.

You may faithful reader of my wordage realised that I haven’t blogged recently despite refreshing this project to start again with the intent to blog more. This is partly because I’m a failure. I have a story in my head for episode two, it’s a love story, it has ritual murder and suicide. It’s not finished, it hasn’t decided if it wants to be darkly funny or just plain grim or it hadn’t when I last approached it which was some time ago. I’ve not achieved much this month. Sure there have been “Real Life” developments, my dissatisfaction with elements of my current employment finally came to a head and I put in for a transfer to a store nearer my place of habitation. This’ll save me an hour a day at least in commuting which is quite decent and give me more time to do other things, and carve out an existence outside of the monotonous hell of working for money. I also traded in a car I liked driving for a smaller car that isn’t a bad drive and has neat features but isn’t so much me. It is however saving me over £400 a year on tax to have this new car and does twice the mileage on a tank that is cheaper to fill than previously so it is over all a win for my bank balance which is good news and to be honest I didn’t really like the other car that much anyways. I only ever realise my preferences in retrospect and even then I never like anything enough for it to really make me rueful of my decisions. I’m not really a fan of having wants, likes and desires. Holding them seems like an arseholish thing to do, there is a sense of entitlement when holding one of those abstract things too dearly which doesn’t run right with me. The Rolling Stones sang “You can’t always get what you want” and that’s pretty true, you make do so over all the new car is a win, and winning is good.

However in the secret shadow life of crazed fantasist turned writer of words there has been no progress. I am in a fucking bad mood, a dodgy state of the head that has lasted for ages. It is getting in the way. When I’m good I get by with 4-6 hours sleep, going to sleep around 2am that gives me a decent chunk of morning before I leave for work sometime afternoon. However whilst this initial 6-8am wake up happens anyways when I’m not in the best of moods I’ll cheat myself out of the morning and stay in bed until 10am. That’s been happening allot. No matter what I intend to get on with it doesn’t get done, I won’t get home from work until almost 10pm, by the time I’ve fed and watered myself I’m not in a working mood, I’m tired and I feel semi-socialble and with all my friends and loved one existing predominantly online for me to interact with, well that’s the evening/night eaten away to the procrastination amplifier of the internet. This happens regardless of my mood, though if I’m enthralled with a project the project takes precedence for research and writing and playing around with.

Civilisation IV is what happens when I’m in a bad mood though, it cuts me off from the friends and folk, and I can just widdle away my time playing a game. It’s fun, it has me avoiding talking to people which is always a plus because my tolerance for interaction is low when I’m in a bad mood. Heck its low anyways, it’s why I do it on the internet so I can take time before responding, don’t have any bodylanguage issues and I can blag a semblance of human decency. It’s why I’ve socialised online since I was 14 years old, which means I’ve been actively retreating from real world interactions for almost a decade now. That’s some failing in my personal being there. Christ mightn’t be fictional but when I think of things like that it is clear I am quite pathetic. So yes, I’ve played quite a bit of Civ4 the past few weeks. In the meantime short stories and novel pitches have stopped, they exist as loose collections of notes and really sketchy drafts requiring tightening, which should’ve happened over the past 4 weeks were it not for me being ridiculously pathetic. The blog hasn’t moved. Heck I’ve managed spates of an hour or two of productivity and it’s waiting to be polished and moved online (Lucy on the bolthole did a decent “Lets make an Ad Mech codex” type thread and I have a page of notes on the Skitari with suggested rules and fluff and background and what not which I’m fairly happy with but haven’t put onto the computer or posted up on the forum or done anything with despite my intentions to do so for the past three weeks almost.

What this isn’t is writers block, I get ideas, I have sat down and written for 20 minutes or so at a time before giving up. Not everything I write is good, mostly I don’t like it and it doesn’t get published anywhere and I just write more of something else. This blog was meant to up my “getting stuff out there and garnering feedback” rate especially considering Bride of Kharn is out there being judged as a complete entity and it is my desperate attempt to justify the shitty position my life is in with “but I’m making an effort to do this writing thing which I enjoy and I don’t think I’m terrible at so it’s OK that my job is rubbish and I live with my parents and all the other issues that plague my confidence with my life exist”. This is me being a fucking pathetic creature who can’t muster a steely reserve of self discipline when he’s experiencing a period of low mood. I’m in a bad mood I don’t like my writing as much anyway, so I give up and retreat into pathetic courses of action that achieve nothing. Lack of achievement cheats me out of any buzz which I can use to build momentum to get on with stuff. It’s a viciously retarded circle of behaviour/emotion that I find inexcusable. I know from times doing “courses” on mental health following some of my previously dodgy times that blaming myself isn’t helping but it’s my natural state of being.

I don’t know why I’ve written all this, the royal wedding is on and I’m striving to avoid that. I couldn’t play civ4 as I have to leave for work in 5 minutes and I can’t keep track of time during gameplay. I’m avoiding my fiction projects because of the reasons I hope I’ve expressed in my undoubtedly incoherent ramble of fucking pathetic gloomy self-esteembashing nonsense. I just felt like a ramble, for the past week and a bit I’ve wondered if airing these thoughts, if just typing them out and articulating them no matter how ham-fisted those articulations are would help. This is me seeing if it does. Hopefully this weekend I can start working on stuff properly again. I’m not saying I’m going to produce stuff that will sell, it’s been a fair old while with no talk back on Bride of Kharn, I may not be there yet but I’m a fantasist, I think up crazy stuff all the time. Part of my avoidance pattern had me drafting up a list, thinking of conversion possibilities and budgeting for a new 40k army, it’s completely hypothetical but dealing with that was preferable to dealing with the real world. It seems making “writing stories” a real thing has backfired a bit in making it another thing to find fantastical methods of avoidance for but I’m still thinking of story ideas, I still get inspiration for bits and pieces every bloody day. It’d be a shame not to exploit the one thing approaching a talent I have I reckon. So I need to get working on it which means I need to steelify my reserves of self discipline really. If only I had a fucking clue how to do that.

Sorry for this post, I’ll try to keep my feelings and what not to myself in future.